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Unicism

As a result of his research and practice Hahnemann made a doctrine out of unicism – prescription of only one drug.  However, I need to make several comments:

Hahnemann talked about the treatment aiming at a complete recovery, while we should consider the cases when the full recovery is impossible, when we can talk only about some improvement or about some relief of the symptoms.  For example, disorders caused by the degenerative disease or conditions when neither patient nor doctor can do anything – chemical and noise pollution of the atmosphere, traumatic family or business situation, and other stressing experiences, which are very common nowadays.  Nevertheless, we can provide a relief in such situations.

  • A prescription of one homeopathic remedy clearly excludes mixing it with other homeopathic remedies.  We give a patient one medication and observe his or her reaction on it.

Advantages of Unicism:

  • An organism has an opportunity to be treated by one pure remedy; unicism demands that a homeopath should be very precise in his choice of prescription. In this case a doctor uses well-know repertories very carefully and accurately chooses a prescription in accordance with the present symptoms.

Disadvantages of Unicism:

  • In practice to hit the bull’s-eye can be very difficult because today patients often take allopathic prescription and non-prescription drugs, which changes their clear symptoms, suppresses the other ones, so that it makes almost impossible for a homeopath to see the illness in its clear and clinical state described many years ago by Hahnemann.  So, Unicism becomes some kind of lottery that is very difficult to win.  Only an outstanding doctor, a great expert, can win this lottery.  From my point of view, this method is only for the exclusive cases.

My everyday experience confirms that the majority of the patients coming for the consultation are:

  • people for whom a relief is possible;
  • people with insufficiently expressed symptoms, as they take allopathic medications;
  • people with changed symptoms caused by toxic environment, toxic food products, chemistry, etc

Pluralism

Pluralism is a method when a doctor prescribes simultaneously several remedies which form one system; or when he prescribes consecutively several remedies that act differently, considering their complementariness or their incompatibility.

Advantages of Pluralism:

  • There are different circumstances when we may need a pluralism approach.  When we use this method, we don’t need to hit the bull’s-eye (as in the case of Unicism, when prescribing only one remedy), but we rather “describe” a present case using several means, and that allows us to soften the result of using this exclusive drug.
  • This technique, to my mind, better considers all the complexness of the history of the illness; and it tries to cover the maximum of the signs on different levels.  This method gives the most satisfaction, i.e. the full coverage of each individual case.  It makes teaching more effective as it is based on thinking and not on memorizing; it provides the most reliable and the most long lasting results, although they are not so sensational as the results of the Unicism.

Disadvantages of Pluralism:

  • Diversity of the prescribed remedies.  Some doctors show “coverage-mania”, i.e. they try to cover absolutely all the symptoms – this diversity, in my opinion, is not very suitable in homeopathy.  Pluralism, mainly, is a pragmatic solution of the concrete problems; it is more difficult to codify than Unicism.
  • Frequent prescription of the homeopathic remedies causes a large quantity of artificially created symptoms.  That damages the clearness of the main symptoms of the disease.

Even in the paragraph 273 of the Organon we can find the following quote: “It is not conceivable how the slightest dubiety could exist as to whether it was more consistent with nature and more rational to prescribe a single well-known medicine at one time in a disease, or a mixture of several differently acting drugs”.

Hahnemann and then Hering, as well as many other not less prominent figures after them, stated that the fast interchange of the drugs might be necessary sometimes, while separate use of either of these drugs would not help recovery.

Complexism

I may say that Complexism is right on the border with Pluralism: it is a prescription of large or small quantity of substances, prepared together in different dilutions (usually low or very low) with more or less frequently repeated administrations: three times a day or more often. However, we must distinguish preparations made

in advance, and sold under the mark of the patented remedies and prescribed in the accordance with the symptoms of the illness: migraine, flue, arthritis, asthma, obesity, fatigue. From my point of view, these preparations are useful as the draining ones, as based on the last publications, the mixtures of the vegetable preparations in small potencies cause a homeopathic drainage, clearing the organism from the toxic elements, which have been accumulated there for years.

In my practice, however, this technique is only an initial or preparing stage for the prescription of deeper homeopathic preparations. As the preparations in my potencies are mixed in large quantity, they have, as a result, a very superficial effect, and, of course, sometimes cannot provide adequate cure without additions of following homeopathic preparations in higher dilutions.

Homeopaths, who continue the whole course of the treatment using mixed forms in lower dilutions, never achieve any serious effect, and if there is any, then it is only for a short time. This technique can be easily called a degeneration of the practical homeopathy, because it does not comply with the fundamental principles of homeopathy regarding both individuality of the patient and personalization of the drugs.  In other words, it is a symptomatic medicine that has mainly (and not even always) a symptomatic effect.

Conclusion

From what was said above it is clear that it is absolutely useless to compare Unicism and Pluralism, and more than that – to make a dogma of either of them. Nowadays, diseases and their symptoms have been changed so much, they have become so different by nature, that it is impossible to squeeze them into any particular conception.  After all I have said, it is clear that Unicistic or Pluralistic homeopathy in no way can be an inexplicit therapeutic method, it is based on all the rules we owe to Hahnemann.